Mysteries of D&D: Rakshasa Hands

This comic is a little old school but it makes me laugh. I genuinely have always wondered about this and I scoured the depths of the internet to find the answer but as with many old school D&D things, the answer seems to come down to “Gary wanted to do it”. On the gameplay side of things, Rakshasa are NO JOKE. They will wreck a party in the right (wrong) circumstances.

Discussion (25) ¬

Okay, does this mean hands actually reversed, so if you held your arms straight out with your hands vertical, you’d have a left hand on your right arm palm out, or reversed in such a way so that basically your hands held out the same way would just have thumbs coming out the bottom? This is critically important to know.

Hee Hee… I actually met Gygax at a party once at GenCon… swapped war stories and such. I never asked about the hands thing, but a couple others (like the rust monster propeller-tail) were pretty much yeah, he wanted it to look that way.

Yeah… 1: Rakshasa are from Indian myth, not Arabic. 2: Half the original D&D monsters came from getting high and playing with dime store rubber dinosaur toys. Or would you like to share with the class what mythology beholders, owlbears, and bulettes are from?

I’m going to guess that it ties to legends about Asian weretigers and how many legends had a “they get this one part of human anatomy wrong” tells. You see similar stuff in some of the weird old European tales, like “it’s smile is upside down” or the like.

Well, according to the not-RPG book “dizionario illustrato dei mostri” (monsters visual dictionary), Massimo Izzi 1989, a huge compendium of nearly every mythological monsters of the world ( http://www.anobii.com/books/Il_dizionario_illustrato_dei_mostri/9788876054495/01f11aaf465a39db75 ) Rakshasa are evil Indian spirits who HAVE backward hands (well, fingers, at least). They are no tigers, though, but they are “yellowish, with fice feet, vith blue neks and covered with chimes” and so forth ^_^’

I am going to say this entire thing baffles me why people think they are backwards. The hands as drawn in 1E Monster Manual are not backwards. The pipe is held in a slightly awkward fashion but hey who are we to judge how tiger headed people should smoke 🙂

In a Marvel Game I ran online for awhile I applied some creativeness and brought in a Rakashasa as an on going baddie. Back in the day it was part of Marvel’s continuity that the Hyperborian world of Conan, Kull, ect was part of the Pre-History of the Marvel Earth (which built a great X-Men story with Manhattan turned into a Hyperborian city). Knowing that the Conan stuff is as much a part of D&D’s DNA as Tolkien I found a home brew conversion guide for 3rd Edition to MSHAG SAGA and decided this Rakashasa had been confined in an artifiact that was recovered by archeologist, and he was freed at ESU (my players were all playing ESU students with powers). The game broke down before I could ever reveal him, but the first session he summoned a band of Drow who had served him in the distant past through time to test the modern world while he remained in shadows. His ultimate goal was going to be a summoning of the Old Gods (Marvel actually has a fairly impressive history of Mythos-lite stuff running in the back ground).